This blog presents news items and resources relating to trial advocacy and the legal system, with a focus on Washington State. It was developed to support the Trial Advocacy Program at the University of Washington School of Law, but now has a broader coverage and a wider audience. In addition to information about trials and trial practice, you'll find notes about appellate practice, the courts, access to justice, and related topics.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Surprisingly, in most U.S. jurisdictions, court proceedings, which can dramatically affect people‟s lives or property, are rarely recorded accurately or in their entirety because only a small percentage of courts regularly create a video record of court proceedings. Of those courts that do, most do not preserve the video record but simply turn it into a transcript.

Keith A. Gorgos, Comment, Lost in Transcription: Why the Video Record Is Actually Verbatim, 57 Buff. L. Rev. 1057, 1058 (2009)(footnotes omitted). The author analyzes ways that transcripts can be inadequate records of trials -- for instance because the text does not include all the non-verbal cues a witness can give or because the court reporter simply did not capture the speech accurage -- and argues that video records be kept and made the official.

Monday, October 5, 2009

After compiling 17 years of data from his own practice, Dallas lawyer Angel Reyes had a hunch that Spanish-speaking plaintiffs who required the use of a translator in the courtroom received smaller awards than those who did not.

Last fall Reyes and two professors from Texas Tech University's Rawls College of Business confirmed his suspicion: Spanish speakers who relied on a translator during court testimony were 15 percent less likely to obtain a jury verdict that exceeded their last settlement offer than were English speakers.